Projects.

Immersive Virtual Reality for Tele-robotics

This project aims to develop a fundamental framework for establishing an immersive virtual reality environment for robust and scalable human robotics interactions in a heterogeneous intelligent architecture. This integrated environment will allow for human robotics interaction with a large number of robotics agents through a virtual reality environment. A number of industry level applications from the manufacturing industry, the gas and oil sector, as well as medical sector will be able to utilize the proposed architecture for the purpose of training, simulation, and testing. A set of novel frameworks will be developed to establish an efficient human-robotics collaborative environment in a fully immersive Virtual Reality (VR) world.
The proposed architecture may be utilized to create digital libraries for a set of industry applications for training and simulation purposes. The investigation results in developing computational and algorithmic frameworks for establishing such environments.

Game Cultures – Virtual Life in MMORPGs

A large number of participants have been recruited to participate in a research study to help our group investigate how cultures and language form and play a role in the age of digital media and virtual worlds. Participants in this research study are asked to play in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). Our research groups is analyzing the ways in which human players communicate with other players or Non Player Characters (NPCs), perform certain tasks and in general socialize in a virtual environment. The study investigates the hypothesis that players in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) communicate with other players not only to complete tasks set by the game design but to socially construct virtual communities with identifiable subcultures. The participants' interactions in the game will be qualitatively analyzed to elicit the dynamics of the virtual subcultures that players have formed. Such discourse analysis is a widely accepted method for ethnographic and anthropological research.

Support

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Gaming for Math Education

Math Castle is a single player, touchscreen, tablet game intended to help young students practice basic math skills. The goal is to make attempting numerous repetitions of math questions more interactive by introducing colorful 3D graphics and altering the entire math scenario into a video game setting. A research study is under way to measure how much students actually learned and if school grades improve. Bloomington is our first pilot school where up to 70 elementary school students from grades one through five are utilizing the game in their mathematics classes.

Relevant Publications

Support

[1]Invista Foundation,
Award No.
,
$25,000,
(August 2014-Agust 2016).

Parallelized Visual Odometry

Tele-operated robots could benefit from some autonomous behavior so every action does not have to be a one-to-one operation. Cargo
manipulation would greatly benefit from autonomous behaviors. The goal of this project is to develop a system of autonomous cargo
manipulation for the tri-ATHLETE robot prototype. This system will require computer vision tasks to interpret the presence, position
and orientation of the cargo containers. These tasks are by nature parallelizable and would benefit from a Field Programmable Gate
Array (FPGA) co-processor capable of such parallel computations. In addition, model learning will be used to increase the robot’s
situational awareness and to guide the inverse kinematics necessary for lifting and manipulating detected cargo. This system will first
be simulated in UHV’s Computation and Advanced Visualization Engineering (CAVE) Lab using the PatrolBot equipped with a stereo
camera and manipulator. Data will be transferred to a GPU accelerated server to simulate the FPGA co-processor, and pseudo-cargo
will be picked up using the manipulator. The Unreal Engine 4 game engine will be used to test each step of the simulation. After the
simulation yields successful models for detection and operation of cargo safely and effectively, the system will be implemented on the
tri-ATHLETE prototype.